President Elsworth Toohey

Paraphrased from Wikipedia: Elsworth Monkton Toohey is the primary antagonist in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead. Toohey is Rand’s personification of evil, the most active and self-aware villain in any of her novels. Toohey is a socialist, and represents the spirit of collectivism more generally. He styles himself as representative of the will of the masses, but his actual desire is for power over others. He controls individual victims by destroying their sense of self-worth, and seeks broader power (over “the world”, as he declares to another of the novel’s characters in a moment of candor) by promoting the ideals of ethical altruism and a rigorous egalitarianism that treats all people and achievements as equally valuable, regardless of their true value. As one reviewer described his approach:

Aiming at a society that shall be “an average drawn upon zeroes,” he knows exactly why he corrupts Peter Keating, and explains his methods to the ruined young man in a passage that is a pyrotechnical display of the fascist mind at its best and its worst; the use of the ideal of altruism to destroy personal integrity, the use of humor and tolerance to destroy all standards, the use of sacrifice to enslave.